National Laboratory Concentrating Solar Power Research

DOE supports concentrating solar power (CSP) research and development and core capabilities at its national laboratories (Program Fact Sheet) to accelerate progress toward achieving the SunShot Initiative's technoeconomic targets. These multi-year projects are funded based on a competitive proposal process and address the challenges pertaining to all CSP subcomponents, including collectors, receivers, power block, and thermal energy storage. The ongoing projects are as follows:

Approach

The National Laboratory R&D program seeks to accelerate progress toward the levelized cost of energy target of $0.06 per kilowatt-hour through novel and transformative research into CSP technologies. DOE national laboratories are working to produce significant improvements in CSP performance and cost by addressing the technical and economic targets of the component technologies, including collectors, receivers, power block, and thermal energy storage as well as through systems analysis.

Innovation

This applied research program supports technological developments that have the potential for dramatic improvements over existing commercial and near-commercial CSP systems.